[jakelarkin]

it's a non-violent crime of opportunity. police time is $150/hour at least. all your loses seem to be covered by the banks, aside from the car window, which um happens to people all the time. its the kind of thing they pursue occasionally in realtime or with a sting, but not each individual case.

change your key, open a new checking account & close old, lock your credit. and that ends your exposure.

you won't get the video footage because it creates a legal liability for the owners to release it.

EDIT I'm all for broken windows but thats still implemented as a sampling approach. They don't actually pursue every low-level crime.

[phyller]

The problem with this point of view, is it's the same people doing this over and over, just causing distress everywhere. For a couple hundred dollars of theft they cause both the loss of the item, but also all sorts of other trouble for everyone else. And the corporation's costs do eventually make it to the consumer as higher prices due to higher cost of doing business. In addition, it is a drain on all of us that we have to take steps to protect ourselves. It's worth the $150/hour to keep this kind of behavior to a minimum.

[jacquesm]

Police and profitability should not be mixed. Whether it costs $50 or $500 / hour to work on a case technically should not even be an issue. The cumulative effect of a lot of small-time crime on a society can be as large as a bank robbery, even if the robbery is a much more serious crime by itself.

[bphogan]

But it is an issue because it's tax dollars, and people don't like paying taxes.

[jon889]

People wouldn’t mind paying taxes as much if they knew where it was going, instead of it going into a black box and no one really sure if it all makes it out to the needed services.

[xyzzyz]

Very, very, very little of the taxes are spent on law enforcement. You could quadruple their budget, and nobody would notice the tax increase.

[rapind]

We could accelerate the inevitable consequences of this approach by curating a list of which areas police don't give af, then publish it for enterprising criminals and anyone considering living there.

[tracker1]

http://communitycrimemap.com/

[Amezarak]

Society is broken badly if getting robbed happens “all the time” without repercussion. It is absolutely not acceptable or normal for your car windows to be broken and your stuff stolen. If I lived in a place where it happened “all the time” I would get out ASAP. This is major dysfunction.

Crime certainly happens everywhere, no place is immune altogether, but it should never be an everyday occurrence.

[greenleafjacob]

San Francisco has an "epidemic" of car break-ins. [1]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-San-Fr...